CARMEN (1926) [Feature]

France (MIFF1981,British Film Archive Retrospective)
Director: Jacques Feyder

This is probably the cinema's best version of Carmen, shot on location in raw, rocky Spanish settings and exuding a hot-house atmosphere of sexual passion and repression which stems more from Merimee's original than from Bizet's opera. Feyder gives it a real tragic flow, culminating in an extraordinary death scene; the bullring episodes have a sweaty authenticity; and the camerawork is very free and mobile. Flaquel Meller makes a glowering, fate-obsessed Carmen with Louis Lerch as a more stolid Don Jose.

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